Feeling Alone!

Our MOPS theme this year focuses on community.  The Steering team spoke for our first meeting and we each took a turn sharing when we have felt alone and have felt or seen community!  Here is what I said...

When was the last time I felt alone?  Sunday.  I’m not kidding, for a few moments on Sunday I felt utterly alone.  I was chopping apples while my son napped, waiting for a phone call from my best friend, and listening to music.  My iTunes decided to play a few songs written by some good friends from school and I had to sit down and have a good cry.  Right after college my husband and I got married and moved so that he could go to seminary.  There I experienced what could be one of the best (but not perfect) communities I will ever find.  Yes, there are always people who will understand what it’s like to be a mom and/or a pastor’s spouse, but there will never be another place where the people will understand so well.  Where the puzzle pieces of our lives will fit so closely together.  We loved seminary.  I have my ups and downs of feeling alone and lost without it even over a year after we graduated.  It was in this community that I learned who I was.  I know that’s so cliché, but it’s true.  A professor at the seminary wrote a book called “The Air I Breathe is Wartburg Air”, a history of the seminary and it is true.  I learned to breathe in that place and to become who you see right now.  A few weeks before graduation my friend Sam asked me if I could see it?  See what?  She said “see the change in yourself.  See how you’ve grown?”  Yes, it was in that place where we felt like we could actually see the change the community made in us, like those time lapsed pictures of a flower opening or a sun rising.  We got to experience noticeable change and those friends I found at seminary would be one of the few to know both the before and after of myself.  I may never find that community again, but I know that it has given me the courage to continue to find communities where I fit in because no matter what we need a place to belong.  I have been able to find communities since we moved here.  Although different then seminary they still happily fill that need that I will always have to be a part of something greater than myself.